Abortion revisited
Wybo Dondorp; UM, Health Ethics Society
Studium Generale 19 April 2011
The abortion debate
• Perennial
• Unusual
• Ethics / Law
• Does the fetus have a right to life?
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Abortion revisited
• Political debate NL
– Impact 20 week ultrasound
– New guidelines premature infants
– New political landscape
• Book: David Boonin. A defense of
abortion, CUP 2003
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Moral status
• Surely if any of us
count for anything
now, we counted for
something before we
were born (Liley)
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Conception criteria (1)
• Same species: human being
• Scientific testimony: human life begins
at the time of conception
• Select 10 uncontroversial examples of
individuals with a right to life
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Conception criteria (2)
• Sanctity of human life
– P1 Fetus is human life from conception
– P2 Every human life is sacred
– P3 If the life of an individual is sacred,
then the individual has a right to life
– C fetus has a right to life from conception
• Sacred
– Religious or secular claim?
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Conception criteria (3)
• Continuity > denial of our right to life
– Conception as non-arbitrary starting point
• ‘What to make of somebody who said
to rate rational agency as of supreme
value, but regarded as expendable any
creature whose powers were as yet
undeveloped’? (Donagan)
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Conception criteria (3)
• Continuity > denial of our right to life
– Conception as non-arbitrary starting point
• ‘What to make of somebody who said
to rate rational agency as of supreme
value, but regarded as expendable any
creature whose powers were as yet
undeveloped’? (Donagan)
• Existence value or integrity value?
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Conception criteria (4)
• Potentiality
• Essential property: potentiality as
identity
• ‘…. in all esential respects the
individual is whoever he is going to
become from the moment of
impregnation.’ (Ramsey)
• Right to life as essential property?
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Conception criteria (5)
• Future-like-ours
• (Marquis: why abortion is immoral)
– A fetus
– B infant
– C suicidal teenager
– D temporarily comatose adult
– E You and me
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Marquis and Boonin
• M: future like ours contains
experiences of the sort that one now
values or will later come to value (if
one is not killed)
• B: not present or future but:
dispositional or ideal (supervenient on
actual desires)
• M: conception
• B: preconscious-conscious
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Postconception criteria (1)
• Implantation (14 days)
• External human form
– Recognizably human after 8 weeks
• Perceived movement (quickening)
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Postconception criteria (2)
• Brain criteria
– Having a brain
– Initial brain activity (ca 6 weeks)
– Organized cortical brain activity (25-32 weeks)
• Necess; sufficient? What about newborns?
• Solutions?
– Lower the standard?
– Potentiality again?
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Boonin: Modified FLO argument
• Missing piece to defend organized
cortical activity criterion
• Potential of the individual’s brain is
morally relevant once the individual
first becomes conscious.
• 25-32 weeks; gray area
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Viability
• Boonin: I do not believe that there are
any good reasons to accept it
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